1) What choices did Hemingway make in the form and structure of the novel? What makes each of the three sections distinct?

2) How does the novel represent the city and the country? What activities takes place in the different locales? What qualities does each locale bring out in Nick? In the others?

3) What are the elements of Hemingway's writing style? How does he utilize vocabulary and syntax to achieve the "Hemingway style"?

4) To Hemingway, writing was like the tip of an iceberg; the reader would see only one-tenth but would feel and understand the rest. Hemingway also believed that the traces of sections he omitted remained in the text and were picked up by the reader. How do these beliefs about writing help you understand Hemingway's distinctive style?

5) According to Carlos Baker, Hemingway stated that The Sun Also Rises is not a "hollow or bitter satire," but a tragedy. Discuss this interpretation of the novel.

6) How does Hemingway employ the ritual of the bullfight in this novel?

7) What is the significance of the title of the novel, The Sun Also Rises?

8) What are the three most significant symbols in the novel? Why?

9) How are women portrayed in the novel? Sexuality? Love? Friendship? Rivalry?

10) What characterizes the Hemingway hero? Consider the heroism (or lack) of each of the characters in the novel.

11) How does Hemingway participate in and make a contribution to modernism? How does he treat some of the characteristic preoccupations of modernism:

self-conscious questioning of all social and moral values
"Make it new."
interest in perception
determination to work creatively with fragmentation (from Cubism to montage)
self-conscious manipulation of the conventions of art itself
themes of alienation and incompleteness
fascination with time and space
dealing with the consequences of World War I

12) Later in the semester, I'll ask you to consider The Sun Also Rises alongside The Great Gatsby and Passing. Here are some topics to think about to bring Hemingway's novel into dialogue with not only the other novels, but the films, advertising, art, music, and other cultural expressions of the Jazz Age:
portraits - importance of women's appearance - commodification - the gaze - the city & "modern life" -foreground & background - tension between nostalgia & progress - landscape - interior & exterior -attention to details ("so much depends upon a red wheel barrow"–Williams) - modernist metaphors (Pound's "Petals on a wet, black bough") - tension between holding a romantic ideal & a modern cynicism - duplicity of modern life - tension between accurate representation of reality & modernist distortion - subjectivity & objectivity

QUESTIONS? E-mail me at llanday@berklee.edu